20110327

Banned

You see, OGame runs 24-7. You build up your planet's defenses, and send ships to raid other people's planets, blow up their fleets, harvest the scrap metal and take it away. But it runs 24-7!

If some big bad bully launches his fleet towards your planet, all you have to do is RUN. It usually takes an hour or two for his fleet to hit your planet, so you just have to pack up all your ships and any raw metal and fly off to another planet. Fleets in transit can't be attacked by anyone.

The problem is, you have to log in to OGame to be notified about an incoming attack. And OGame runs 24-7.

Obviously, this is a problem to be solved by a computer! So I wrote a little script that ran on my laptop. Every ten minutes, it would log in, and if I was being attacked it would send a text message to my phone.

Michele hated it. However I was also covering for European and Asian trading operations at the time, so I could be getting texted for work-related reasons, which would also send me scurrying to the computer. Ha ha ha chuckle. When she found out I was rolling out of bed because I was under attack, I knew I was not going to be able to pull that stunt anymore and had to take it to the next level.

So, there I was coding scripts to automatically pack up all my spare metal into my ships and fly them off to another one of my planets. It wasnt too hard, the hardest part was dealing with all the finicky bits of OGame's user interface that was designed for humans.

Hours well spent. I'd wake up the next morning to see a log of the night's averted catastrophes. I was invicible!

Before my invention, my ranking hovered around #150 among the star empires of Universe 9. But now my ranking just kept climbing and climbing. I cracked into the top 100 after a week.

Then I added automation to scout neighboring planets. That was fun, getting all the reports on which planets were well-defended, which had piles of metal basically begging to be stolen. Top 75. Then I dumped all the scouting reports into a database. Top 50. Hey, why not automatically send fleets to take metal from the undefended planets? Top 30.

Then the unthinkable came. Time to go on vacation. Would I bring my laptop with me? Then it would have no internet access, and then it wouldn't be checking on my planets. Unacceptable. So, leave the laptop at home, plugged in and running.

But while on vacation, I did find time to log in and check on my empire. Looking good! Top 25. And then while taking the bus home, checked in from my phone.

Then the hammer dropped. Banned for account sharing. Account sharing?

Ok, your account will be unbanned if I can get satisfactory answers to the following questions.

On the 23rd of July, how did you manage to get from New York to Atlanta, Georgia, in 13mins?
If this was an account sit, then fine.

However, care to explain how less than 2 hours later, you made it from New York to Langhorne, Pennsylvania, in a mere 24mins?

That's 2 sittings in the same day = ban.
Or account sharing = ban.

I tried to explain, but then they asked:

Also this does not explain how you've managed to log onto the server 24 hours a day from the 5th to the 27th July, without so much as 2 hours break. I consider myself to be an avid OGamer, but over 3 weeks without sleep?

I broke down and confessed everything:

It's not account sharing, it's a program I wrote to log in every 15-30 minutes and make sure that nobody's attacking me. When the Ogame rules were revised, the revised rules removed the explicit mention that automation is not permitted. However, the terms of service still have some language suggesting this is not permitted, so I could understand a decision either way.

Anyway, I think it would be interesting to have an ogame Universe where automation is not discouraged -- for example each account is allowed a quota of 5000 HTTP requests per day.

I would be happy to help in the modification of the server code to implement such a quota system.

Final verdict?

As Im sure you will understand, the ban will remain in place.

28.07.2006 21:46:01 CWB djdjdj 12.12.2033 20:46:01 Account Sharing

So consider yourself invited.

I am throwing one hell of a party on Dec 12, 2033.

Oh and I almost forgot the best part. In OGame I went by the name DJDJDJ. And through all the raiding and carpet-bombing and thuggery I had made a few friends. We stuck up for each other mob-style, retaliating in defense of our friends even at great personal expense. So when I was banned until 2033, one of my OGame buddies made this: